Terra Amata

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  A LIVING MAN

  You could try to express what bliss it was in those days to be alive. Of course there were bothersome things here or there. Terrible things, if you looked too closely. There was the dreadful burden of everything that’s too much alive, all that mingles with air, earth and water in an attempt to destroy you. There was the malice of men, the voracity of beasts, and the indifference of objects. There were all the sounds and sights and smells like continual dagger-thrusts in the flesh. It wasn’t easy to live with all those things; no, no one could have said it was easy. But all the same it was funny in a way, touching and funny, a splendid adventure complete with emotion, language, consciousness, and perhaps, in some recess of the memory, a kind of nostalgia for silence and peace.

  Yes, what was happening to you was an unforgettable and unique adventure. No one else would ever know about it, and no one would ever really want to know. And yet you had been there one day on the earth, a living man. You’d learned to walk and talk and eat and read and write. You’d smiled for the first time. You’d begun to love, or hate. You’d tried to understand, you’d looked at the sky, the clouds, the sun, the yellow flowers. You’d waved your arms about. You’d been afraid. And all this hadn’t happened to somebody else: it all concerned you, it was you it was all about. Your face. Your skin. Your hair and nails and tufts of whiskers. Your brain. Your inside, your heart. Your hands, your arms, your legs, your ankles, your elbows. Whatever happens now, whatever the outcome of this too long story, you can’t pretend it wasn’t you. You can’t avert your eyes or skip the pages or shut the book and do your nails with a little pocket-file. It won’t wash. Other people might believe you’d forgotten, but not you. You can’t get away from yourself. You must live, and go on living. You must go on reading the picture-book that tells your story, like this, right to the very end.

  It’s an interesting story because it’s about you. You could even say it’s the only interesting story you’ll ever come across. You get up from the bed you’re lying on or the chair you’re sitting in. You walk up and down the room, you look out of the window at what’s going on in the street or the garden. Then you come back into the middle of the room and pretend to light a cigarette with a match or maybe a lighter. Or you undo the cellophane wrapping round a mint and put it in your mouth. You scratch your left ear. If there’s someone else in the room, your wife for instance, you say:

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I asked what the time was.’

  ‘Ten past five.’

  ‘Shall we go for a walk?’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Oh? I don’t know. I thought we might—’

  ‘But we have to be here at six.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course.’

  ‘And look at the weather.’

  ‘Yes, it’s going to rain.’

  ‘Don’t you want to read any more?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is it any good?’

  ‘We-e-ell.’

  ‘I bought a very good detective story the other day when I was out with Annie.’

  ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘The book?—Along the Dotted Line.’

  ‘Who’s it by?’

  ‘I can’t remember—an American, I think, or perhaps an Englishman. It’s about a chap that sends people letters with typhoid germs all over them. Good idea, eh?’

  ‘Not bad … And you can’t remember the name of the author?’

  ‘Bowling, Rowlins, something like that.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘Or perhaps it was a German called Reuter.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I was with Annie. We were walking along the street because she had an appointment with—’

  ‘What about going to the cinema?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘What about going to the cinema this evening?’

  ‘What’s on?’

  ‘Nothing special, I don’t think.’

  ‘The cinema every evening—I’m beginning to get fed up with it.’

  ‘What else would you like to do? I suppose you’re not suggesting we go to the theatre?’

  ‘Are you joking?’

  ‘No, but seriously, why not?’

  ‘If you can’t think of anything else do a crossword puzzle. I’ve got work to do.’

  ‘If we only had a telly it’d be something.’

  ‘It was you who were against it it. You said it made you seasick.’

  ‘Yes, if you watch it every evening.’

  ‘You would watch it every evening.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘I know you.’

  Then you light another cigarette. You breathe out blue smoke through your mouth and grey through your nostrils, in little puffs. You pick up a magazine and flick through the pages, looking at the photographs and the captions, the advertisements for brassières and corsets, the advertisements for cars and refrigerators and milk chocolate and nut milk chocolate. You look at the dim photographs with girls smiling and climbing out of cars revealing sun-tanned thighs, girls running along beaches in skin-tight blue and orange swimsuits, their long hair blown across their faces in the wind and sunshine. You look at all this in silence, not happy, when really you ought every second to rush out into the street and carve in the bark of every plane-tree, scrawl on every wall and on every sidewalk :

  JUNE 11, 1966

  I AM ALIVE

  But that wouldn’t be enough. You’d need to be everywhere at once, on the tops of the mountains when the Northern Lights appear, at the bottom of the sea for the silent explosions of volcanoes, inside the trunks of trees when the rain begins to plop gently down on every leaf. You’d need to be there in the midst of war, stretched out in the mud when all the bombs whistle down together and dig their black craters in the fields. Or rushing along inside a jet-plane, not thinking, filled with the blind imperative that orders you to kill and kill again. You’d need to be there at every accident at every intersection, and walk through the shattered glass and pools of petrol looking at the bodies lying in the road covered with white blankets. You’d need to be able to think everything, speak everything, try to understand everything. To imagine every town lying in the curve of a valley under a sky cloudy or clear, with every river sending its muddy waters under the spans of the bridges. You’d need to be able to live everywhere, your whole life through, with a wife and three or four children, friends, a car, a dog, a cinema, a house of your own. In Dar-es-Salaam for example, right in the terrible heat reflected back off the brick walls. Or in Agrigentum, a prisoner of the chalk-coloured mountain, while the flies buzz through the heavy air. In Lima, crushed by the never-ending drought, or Bristol, breathing in factory-smoke and fog strewn through the dark air. In Sherbrooke in the stifling snow; in Gorman, California, away in the depths of darkness. In Hamburg, Calcutta, Syracuse. You’d need to live a long time on every acre of the earth, breathing its air, drinking its clear or cloudy water, eating its meat, exposing your skin to its dull or blazing suns. Leaving your excrement everywhere to glide away through the mysterious channels of the sewers. Living with dark women or with pale women, speaking all the incomprehensible tongues, worshipping all the innumerable gods with thousands of prayers, gestures and offerings.

  And then you’d need to go further still. You’d need to have left this blue planet and rummaged around in space. To have been born millions of light-years away on an earth of metal or mercury, with a red sky and six tiny suns spinning round the horizon.

  You’d need to have waited for centuries and centuries and seen the mountains slowly worn away by the wind and the sea drying up in its bed like a pool of petrol. Other species might come, and other cataclysms. A sudden gash might open in the midst of the land, and tons of lava pour out and gradually cover the whole planet.

  Or you could go backwards in time and creep all hairy through the hostile jungle. Huge animals with sharp claws would lurk in the depths of the forests and you
would flee with beating heart. And in the evening, crouched in a tiny cave, you would make odd scrawls with a stub of charcoal to try to tell what happened during the day.

  You’d have had to do all that to be really happy. You’d have had to live all those lives at once to be happy as a god. But obviously it wouldn’t have been very easy.

  So, like Chancelade, you got up at night because you couldn’t sleep. Outside in the darkness the animal cries echoed strangely. Toads croaked on the other side of the valley, calling to one another from hundreds of yards apart. Drunken crickets whirred crazily. In the yard of some sinister invisible house a dog howled in fear. Everywhere arose mysterious creaks, tiny reports, scrapings, buzzings, rustlings of wings—all telling that the house, the whole world, was a prey to the army of unknown insects. And somewhere in the garden, hidden in the heart of a tree, a nightingale uttered every six seconds its artificial cry, that always contained three words:

  ‘Phui phui, rrrwoooïïï, rrrhouyouyou’

  ‘Koutyou, kreuhühü, hui, hui hui’

  ‘Hou hou hou, huïtheu, kut’

  ‘Hapuuuu, hahui hahui, hou hou hou’

  ‘Frrriiooo, krieu, pou-tou pou-tou’

  ‘Houhüüü houhüüü, pioo pioo pioo, trrriiit’

  ‘Phui phui, phuu prriootyou huitki, kooo’

  You leaned your head against the cold window and tried to look out through the slits in the shutters. But all you could see was a great formless darkness, with perhaps the misty star of a street-lamp in the distance. Then you listened to all the sounds that unfurled in disorder in the night, and they became a sort of strange language telling the long long history of living life. And little by little you realized that you knew all these words, all these names, and that in a way you’d always known them. What they said was simple: they told of battles, of flights through the air or the grass, of food spied on for hours and stolen in a flash. They also told stories of love, of the urgent appeals from the female to her mate, and the lewd scents that madden across miles of separation. Bodies were ready to couple, and sought one another through the labyrinth of night. Feathers were sleek, eyes bright, muscles flexed. They told stories, too, of eggs that must be laid in a warm place, and larvae swelling in their cocoons. All these stories were alike yet each was different. The novelty of life was endless, and adventures repeated themselves over and over unceasingly. The stories paralleled one another, phrases learned by heart and never forgotten; they called to one another; passed one another in the evening air; bored their way through the night; and they all came together blindly and by chance to make up the greatest story of all, the most beautiful, the one and only story that never finishes being told.

  I GREW UP

  There was also that other day, a real day of conflagrations. A day with boiling sun, white haze, east wind, motionless mountains, motionless sea, motionless sky, sweat on the back and under the armpits, shirt sticking to you, and a black storm riding the horizon. The boy Chancelade had left the house immediately after lunch and walked through the streets of the town towards the sea. He’d put on a red sweater with white stripes, and round his neck he wore his beautiful new green towel. He’d stuffed it into his satchel before he came out so that his parents wouldn’t see he wasn’t going to school. Then he’d hidden his satchel in a disused drainpipe, keeping only his beautiful green towel, which he hung round his neck. He’d walked in the sun, he’d crossed several intersections with nobody about, gone through streets silent and deserted. He’d gone by a hot garden where an old man in blue trousers and a straw hat was raking the grass into heaps. He’d dragged his feet through the dust, he’d walked along the tops of walls. He’d crossed a level-crossing. He’d picked up a round stone with a hole in it and thrown it at a cat that was sitting between the wheels of a car. In this way he’d crossed the whole belt of villas, houses, kitchen gardens and waste land that you had to go through to get to the sea. Sometimes he’d walked fast, sometimes slowly, whistling, singing, talking to himself, or saying nothing. But every so often he whirled his beautiful green towel round his head like a sword. He’d passed several boys and girls on their way to school, walking in twos and threes in the opposite direction. He’d looked at them scornfully because he knew about five or six of them—Delpire for example, and Villand, Roussel, Gioffret, Dunan, Maryse, Falchetto, Chantal and Calmet—and they were on their way to school whereas he had decided not to go any more. They had turned round to watch him go by, and must have said something like:

  ‘Did you see him? He’s going swimming.’

  ‘We ought to tell, that’d teach him.’

  ‘Yes, they’d chuck him out for sure.’

  Then they’d gone on to something else—Delpire’s father’s new car, probably.

  When he got to the boulevard that led to the sea the boy had bought himself an ice-cream cone. He’d been wanting to do that for a long time: go swimming on a Friday during algebra, and buy a big ice-cream cone. The woman at the stall looked at him and said:

  ‘What flavour?’

  ‘What flavours are there?’ he asked.

  ‘Vanilla lemon coffee strawberry chocolate,’ said the woman.

  ‘Vanilla strawberry,’ Chancelade said.

  ‘Vanilla strawberry,’ she repeated.

  Then he went on down the boulevard licking his ice. When the ice-cream was finished Chancelade threw away what was left of the cone and wiped his hands on his beautiful new green towel.

  A little way further and he was at the beach. It was a level stretch of flat pebbles with a narrow strip of white sand at the water’s edge, dumped there by lorries for the tourists. The boulevard still continued parallel to the beach and the boy walked on for a while to find a good place. There were lots of people on the beach. Fat men, fat women and fat children lay on the stones, their pink skins gleaming with sun-tan lotion. Beside them were hampers of provisions, rubber life-belts, transistors or dogs. A kind of strong odour, sweat perhaps, or the alkaline smell of water and urine mixed, wafted up from the flat sunny beach. You could hear shouts too, sudden exclamations, the squeals of little girls, twangs of music. Chancelade sat down on the low wall separating the beach from the road and watched, holding on to both ends of the green towel round his neck.

  He watched a hairy man picking his way carefully towards the water so as not to hurt his feet. He waded in till the water was halfway up his thighs then plunged forward and disappeared. In the other direction, to the left of a heap of sea-weed and rubbish, a three-year-old in a cap suddenly started to howl because he’d been stung by a wasp; Chancelade watched his mother come and carry him away. An Alsatian lay blinking and panting under a big striped sunshade. And nearby a girl with fair hair slowly rubbed cream into the back of another girl with dark hair.

  Chancelade decided that the best thing to do so as not to be disturbed was to go as close as possible to the water. He slouched across the beach, going round several bodies lying on the pebbles, and went and sat down no more than a few inches from the water’s edge, where there was a little bit of sand between the stones. He sat there for a few minutes watching what went on around him. The sea lay stretched out like a slab of concrete, grey, heavy, thick, with only, from time to time, a sort of swell that seemed to stay in the same place. The occasional gusts of wind bore a sharp and disagreeable odour. The sky was blue. The sun shone fiercely almost in the centre of the atmosphere. When Chancelade felt himself beginning to perspire he threw the green towel down on the beach and undressed. Then he stretched himself out on the ground, the red and black check of his bathing-trunks contrasting oddly with his over-white skin.

  Chancelade let the sun’s warmth lap round and enfold him. He waited second after second to feel each separate square inch of his skin being burned. It was strange: it was like having a mobile eye that shifted hither and thither over the thin surface of skin, roving about, at the whim of chance or of the will, to make contact with the world. Eyes shut, deaf to the sounds that rose from the beach and the sea,
the boy lived entirely in his skin as revealed by the sun. He no longer had any hands or legs or stomach or face, or red and black check bathing-trunks. He was an old wrinkled tree-trunk, a leafless twig, a spongy mass, or one covered with identical scales on all of which the hot air weighed down with equal pressure. A stranded jelly-fish, a puddle of dirty water, a bit of earth enclosed in the earth. The tingling caused by the sun came and went with slow shudders just like the movements of the clouds in the sky and the jetsam on the sea. It was curious, that: he was at once here, lying with his back pressed firmly against the ground and his chest and stomach facing up into the vault of the sky—exposed, rooted; and at the same time there, elsewhere, floating somewhere above the horizon, completely detached from the world. Without thinking, without moving, he could separate himself from his own effigy and almost look down on himself from some dream height. Right in the depths of the void, very far away but very clear, he could see this kind of clearing lit by the yellow circle of the sun, and in the centre of the clearing was his white body in red and black check bathing-trunks, lying motionless on its back with its arms flung out. And he could see this place that he inhabited rushing away at a dizzy speed, as if he was being whirled along on a rocket travelling millions of miles per second. And yet the more the flat stretch of beach withdrew from him the more visible its details became beneath the pitiless lens. And suddenly Chancelade understood. He understood that he was there, on that narrow beach, alone in the midst of so many men, women and children, a living corpse.

  He was so surprised by this discovery that he felt a stab of anguish shoot through his mind. His forehead and back covered in sweat, a pain in his stomach, he sat up and looked eagerly before him. The sea was still there, smooth and oily, and behind him the beach still echoed with the same shouts and noises. A pale sky still covered the void, and the sun shone on in the same place. A little motor-boat chugged painfully across the bay, its gasps and splutters fitfully audible on the shore. Chancelade wiped his hands and face with a corner of the towel. Then he got up and went in the water.